


Baby, I get mystified by how this city screams your name

by isola13



Category: The Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Post-Book Series: The Dark Artifices, Post-Book Series: The Infernal Devices, Spoilers for Book Series: The Infernal Devices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:47:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28328493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isola13/pseuds/isola13
Summary: Approximately a hundred years later, after Jem passes away. Tessa visits London again.
Relationships: Jem Carstairs/Tessa Gray, Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood, Tessa Gray/Will Herondale
Comments: 2
Kudos: 27





	Baby, I get mystified by how this city screams your name

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Taylor Swift's song Cornelia Street. Inspired by the song.

_ I hope I never lose you, hope it never ends. _

_ I’d never walk blackfriars bridge again _

_ that’s the kind of heartbreak time could never mend _

_ I’d never walk blackfriars bridge again _

_ And baby i get mystified by how this city screams your name _

_ And baby I'm so terrified of if you ever walk away _

_ I’d never walk blackfriars bridge again _

2213, London.

If there is one bad habit that stuck to Tessa through centuries, it’s this.

Magnus says it’s not a bad habit. Says he understands. But he still follows her almost every year except the ones he can’t, and when she needs him, he’s always there.

Perhaps the only person in the world who truly knows how she feels.

More than a century has passed. While Magnus and Alec didn’t have a special meeting place like she and Jem did, she notices how he avoids New York most of the time.

Like she avoids London.

They notice each other, but don’t acknowledge it.

“Are you going this year?”

“Yes.”

Magnus doesn’t argue back, doesn’t advise otherwise. He merely says, “I’m worried for you, Tessa.”

Tessa understands.

“I’m going.”

The first year after Jem died, this time truly gone from her arms, she had returned to London in a desperate attempt. She wished to be close to her loved ones, so she wished to be in the city she first found her loves. The moment she had stepped in the city however, she recoiled and left. Like the presence of the city left a burning imprint on her. She needed to escape the unexpected pang of pain.

“I don’t understand,” she told Magnus in Paris. 

Magnus looked at her warily. “I don’t understand either.”

How mysterious that the city screams their names. Not until Jem was gone did Tessa realize that he was the only thread that held her together in London. Even back when he was a Silent Brother, after she had lost her first family with Will, echoes of names and faces that reverberated every time she had stepped inside this wretched city. Will. James. Lucie. Charlotte. Henry. Cecily. Sophie. Gabriel. Gideon. And all her nieces and nephews, who had passed on long before. 

Jem’s presence, however small or muted by the Silent Brother runes, had kept the screamings afar. Now he joined one of them.

It was her second attempt at going to London that she realized the pain wasn’t a simple burn. It was screams. 

Time isn’t healing. It’s a new heartbreak every single time.

Right now, as she steps inside the city, she can’t see the Blackfriars Bridge yet.

Perhaps the most aching part of it all is that she  _ wants  _ to see London. London, with its gray skies and rainy days, had become her first home and family when she had left New York. Despite the changes and new decorations that have enveloped the land over centuries, she can still see London as she saw it first, through Jem’s eyes and then Will’s.

She thinks about Will, who left behind his family in Wales and Jem, who left behind his childhood in Shanghai, and herself who had left behind her old, old life veiled against the Shadowhunter world in New York.

It seems unfair that a place that bound them together causes so much pain.

Magnus said once that the first time was always the hardest. And it would get easier. But for Tessa, she knows that’s not true. Because there will never be a next one now. Not after Jem. No more easier love and loss.

Jem isn’t here anymore.

But Tessa is still here.

Time may not be healing her, but she is still here.

The screams are still echoing here, but Tessa doesn’t want to hate the place she loves. So she leans against the Blackfriars Bridge and waits until the screams turn into whispers, and voices of old loved ones, and waits until she knows that without pain, she wouldn’t have had the luxury of love and happiness felt so deep in her bones.

She waits until she loves the city once more.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! reviews and comments are welcome


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